So the second Women’s March happened on Jan 20,2018. Last year my wife went with a woman from DAR and an old friend. She was very impressed with the March and wanted to go this year. Unfortunately she doesn’t know any DAR members around here yet and her friend didn’t want to go. I was not comfortable with her going by herself so I volunteered to accompany her. The day started with an early train ride. When we arrived at the station there were three other women standing there. They asked if we were going to the March. My wife said yes and they screamed happily and said “and you brought a Man—YES!!” They then began to talk about the old days of the Women’s Liberation Movement. This then passed quickly into the size of their teen-age bras and then to burning their bras. This was the start of a very remarkable day.
When we arrived at Grant Park the crowd didn’t seem that big, but it kept growing. Estimates now are that there were more than 300,000 people in the park. I have never been in a crowd that large. I have never been in a crowd with that many angry, passionate, white women. There were some Hispanic and African American folks. There was also more than a scattering of men. Much of the focus of the day was to get everyone to register to vote so that we can get rid of the present administration. The crowd was remarkably well behaved. No physical violence happened and there were really a lot of funny and very witty signs.
The last time I was in Grant Park with a fairly large crowd was in 1970. We had gone down to see a free concert from Sly and the Family Stone. The crowd then was pretty happy and fairly high. You could almost get a contact high from the amount of weed that was floating in the air. Now since this was such a long time ago I need to talk a little about Sly and his group. They became really famous after the Woodstock concert movie. Everyone wanted to see them. The problem was that because of their own substance issues they were often late or often didn’t even show up for their scheduled events.
As we all waited and waited and waited for the band to show, the nice easy-going crowd grew more and more restless. All at once chairs were being tossed and there was a real threat that things were getting out of control. Now the Chicago Police at that time were not big music fans. This was only two years after the riots of the 1968 Democratic convention. By this time anyone with long hair was looked at as a Communist sympathizer trying to overthrow the government. They saw the crowd getting out of control and “By God there was not going to be another riot in this town!!” So the police charged the crowd and every body started to run. My friends and I were all semi hippie do-gooders. We tried to get people to not run and be careful. We though we were doing a good job until the tear gas and mace hit us. All of a sudden we couldn’t breathe and really couldn’t see. We all staggered away and were thankful that we weren’t hurt more.
So the Women’s March brought back a lot of memories. During the presidential campaign someone asked me why I didn’t want Trump to win. I said that I didn’t want to live thru the 60s again. I had already done that. I came from a very traditional family and always believed in our government. When I started college in the mid 60s the Vietnam War was just beginning to heat up. I couldn’t understand why people were against it. As the years passed and more and more information came out and more and more guys my age were being killed, my position changed. Not only did I not want to go into service, I didn’t want anyone else to either. Why get killed for a government that lies to you? We would march and wear T-shirts and armbands and have long alcohol driven conversations into the small hours of the morning. When the war finally ended we all were relieved and ready to get on with our lives and then came Watergate.
Unless you lived thru that, you really cant understand the absolute betrayal that we all felt. Our own President was conspiring in a criminal enterprise. How could that happen? The country was totally divided. The war had begun the divide and Watergate only made it worse. The group that supported Nixon was not as large as those against him, but they never forgot what had happened. As the Democrats and Republicans changed places in the government, they would always try to get back some of what they had lost during this time.
I think we all hoped those times were over, but the anger and seeming hatred of the past keeps coming back. Now it is starting all over again. The speakers at the Women’s March would have fit right in at any of our 60s and 70s meetings. I kept waiting for a crowd roar of “Power to the People!! No More War !! ”, but instead the new cries are “Time’s Up—It’s our time now!!’ and “We can Win!”. I hope my apathy and reluctance will go away soon, but everyday seems to bring a new crisis. I just think it really is time to step back and think about what I really want and how much I want to work on achieving it. Right now I am focused on my own very small world and the people in it and right now that is as far as I can go. Nikos Kazantzakis has a quote in one of his books. “When a man is young, the world is too small. When he is old, his own village is too large.” My village feels very large right now. I just want all the people in it to be safe. Maybe that is what I need to keep thinking about.